Rhineland building centres procure industry ERP and virtual desktops from the Business Cloud® of Pironet NDH

(PresseBox) (Cologne, 13.12.2012)For the building material experts Fassbender Tenten, P.W. Hieronimi and Friedrich Mies, Cloud Computing is absolutely essential for their IT. The companies, which have over 19 branches in the southern Rhineland and have cooperated to form a group called the Bauspargruppe, will in future obtain most of their information technology from Pironet NDH's Business Cloud®. As a result, a total of 420 employees will work at virtual Windows workstations which they will access over the internet. In addition, the Bauspargruppe will outsource business applications which they use jointly, including central enterprise resource planning, to Pironet NDH.

Working in the Cloud

The companies in the Bauspargruppe had already made use of desktop virtualisation in the past. "Thanks to the cloud computing model 'Desktop as a Service' from Pironet NDH, however, we will for the first time profit from obtaining virtual workstations according to requirements and pay per user per month," says Dieter Müller, Managing Director of Friedrich Mies in Hachenburg in the Westerwald region.

Procuring IT with the click of a mouse

In addition to making the company's own IT costs more flexible, the significantly simplified procurement processes available today were also a reason for choosing the Business Cloud®: "Our IT coordinators order virtual desktops via an easy-to-operate, self-service portal with just a few clicks of the mouse," explains Dieter Müller.

When released, the turnkey Cloud desktops are already configured and equipped with the necessary software, such as the Office package from Microsoft as well as Exchange access. Fully configured IT workstations for new members of staff are consequently available within a few minutes. "Desktop as a Service means that the companies in the Bauspargruppe have a homogeneous client environment, which greatly facilitates our cooperation in the IT sector," adds Dieter Müller.

Virtual hardware resources for resource planning

Pironet NDH will not just supply the Bauspargruppe with client systems from its Business Cloud®. The ICT service provider and Cloud specialist will also operate the central enterprise resource planning system Gevis using Microsoft Dynamics NAV and a Document Management System in its high-security data centres.

For these systems, too, the Bauspargruppe will take advantage of the service provider's Cloud infrastructure. The business-critical applications obtain the infrastructure resources they require, such as memory and computing power, in line with their requirements from the Business Cloud® of Pironet NDH.

High availability through second Cloud data centre

The companies of the Bauspargruppe will control all the business processes, for example procurement, storage, sales and financial accounting, using the ERP system Gevis, the heart of the IT environment. "Failure of this system would be absolutely critical for our companies. The powerful, high-availability infrastructure of the data centres was therefore an important reason why we chose Pironet NDH," emphasises Dieter Müller.

The ICT service provider will operate a complete copy of the Bauspargruppe's IT environment in a second, geographically separate data centre. If a fault occurs in the main infrastructure, Pironet NDH will immediately switch to the standby systems. Business operations are thus guaranteed, even if an entire data centre crashes. "As a network of small to medium-sized companies we could not have achieved such a high level of security with our own resources and our own personnel," says Dieter Müller.

Instead, the IT staff in the various companies of the Bauspargruppe will focus on coordination and strategic development of the IT. The operative work for IT functions will be handled by the service provider. "Our core business is trading and sales, not information technology. When it comes to IT, we leave the work to the specialists," says Mr Müller in summary.